Warning: For Mature Republicans Only. Seriously.

BlogPulse's no. 14 news story today will produce strong reactions across the board, so let's just get right to the heart of this thing: A lot of conservatives, including the indicited former vice presidential chief of staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby, write trashy, trashy sex books. In this piece from The New Yorker, reporter Lauren Collins takes us through copulative encounters as penned by Safire, Buckley, Erlichman and O'Reilly, all of which seem pretty tame compared to Libby, whose 1996 book "The Apprentice" involves deer, bears, and Japanese people. Collins calls these books by conservative operatives "an outlet for ideas that might not fly at, say, the National Prayer Breakfast." Uh, yeah. And if you thought these might stay isolated from politics, our response is ha ha, because you're in the blogosphere, Jack: at least one poster asks, "Can you say hypocrisy?" and writes: "Lucky this administration isn't getting indicted for sex. Only the Dems can be castigated for their sexual deviance. But the GOP is much better at it." Quite. Here's a different take, asked straightforwardly: "Does anyone else get the idea that perhaps the hyper-moralizing anti-sex positions of the Republicans might stem less from moral conviction than from a paralyzing fear of people realizing that they have no idea how it's supposed to work?" An interesting theory, but how might Newt Gingrich respond?

Posted by Philip Ewing at November 1, 2005 10:08 AM

Category: The Dead-Tree Scene